Medicare Slow To Adopt Telemedicine Due To Cost Concerns

Telemedicine would be a useful way to approach parity except for the resistance of bean counters...

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For several days, she had thought she had thrush, a mouth infection that made her tongue sore and discolored with raised white spots. When Miles, 68, awoke on a wintry February morning and the pain had not subsided, she decided to see a doctor. So she turned on her computer and logged on to www.livehealth.com, a service offered by her Medicare Advantage plan, Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Ohio. She spoke to a physician, who used her computer’s camera to peer into her mouth and who then sent a prescription to her pharmacy.

“This was so easy,” Miles said.

For Medicare patients, it’s also incredibly rare.